Sensor Accuracy Drives Performance - Model-Based Development Improves E-Motor Reliability and Efficiency

As inductive heating becomes more popular, cookware manufacturers must develop efficient cooking pans that meet consumers’ expectations. Groupe SEB’s engineers aimed to create a new pan that fulfilled product requirements while minimizing material and development costs. Because testing physical prototypes is time-consuming, the engineers created a virtual prototype of an induction hob. The Groupe SEB’s team realized a parametric model of an induction hob heating system considered the entire system’s magnetic and thermal aspects. Parallel lab tests confirmed the numeric model’s accuracy, which gave the engineers a better understanding of the induction exchange, and helped them eliminate valid but inefficient solutions before building the first prototype.

An engineer working for Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation Marine Systems (NGSC-MS) was given a project to improve their teams’ current NASTRAN results post-processing workflow by writing a script to automate the task. They reached out to Altair for collaboration and Altair engineers were able to quickly determine that Altair’s mathematical modeling environment – “Altair Compose” – would be the ideal solution due to its ability to read, manipulate, and write NASTRAN results. Also, the Open Matrix Language is a scripting language that is familiar to the engineering community. Given sample NASTRAN results and requirements Altair engineers provided a “template” script. The NGSC-MS team was able to quickly understand and modify the script to their goals. The custom results were then viewable in HyperView as a contour plot, which saved a considerable amount of time during post-processing and documentation workflows.

As a key to growth in the coffee machine industry, innovation has always been a core pillar of Gruppo Cimbali’s company philosophy. Investing in the research and development of high-performance machines is a strategic decision, and Gruppo Cimbali is proud to be recognized as one of the first companies in the sector to expand into telemetry, Internet of Things (IoT), and Wi-Fi connected machines. To continue to deliver on its innovation promise, the company now applies digital twins – utilizing Altair Activate® – to their development processes enabling it to design better products, shorten development times, and increase energy efficiency.

ZF develops a wide variety of e-motors and e-drives for a broad spectrum of automotive customers. To optimally incorporate development and production costs from the outset, their designers must find solutions to maximize shared parts within the given requirements for the motors. ZF, in collaboration with Altair, employed a simulation and data-driven solution that empowered them to consider shared parts, costs, and further constraints to automatically find best configurations for a modular motor platform.

Improving perceived quality and passenger comfort by minimizing buzz, squeak, and rattle (BSR) and eliminating unwanted noises in a car is a common challenge in vehicle development, especially as these issues are often detected late in the development phase. The new aspect to this challenge is the development of electrical vehicles (EV) that do not have a combustion engine covering up these small noises. Headquartered in Göteborg, Sweden, China Euro Vehicle Technology AB (CEVT) is a subsidiary of Geely Holding Group, a global automotive group including brands such as Volvo Cars, Lotus, and others. CEVT is an innovation center for mobility solutions, focusing on vehicle architecture. To facilitate and improve design choices early in the development phase, CEVT uses Altair solutions and multi-disciplinary optimization for a simulation-driven design approach allowing for rapid design iterations.

The competitive consumer device industry has quick time-to-market deadlines. Smartphone cameras use voice coil motor (VCM) actuators to translate a lens in three degrees of freedom in order to bring an object to focus on the image plane and to optically stabilize the camera. To ensure optimal design, the Motorola Mobility team selected Altair Flux™ to simulate the entire VCM and camera system. Flux allowed the team to quickly validate designs and ensure that the part compatibility and camera performance met the design targets. Other devices within the phone, such as speakers, antenna shields, accessory magnets etc. can affect the VCM performance due to magnetic interference. With Flux, the team simulated the entire VCM and phone layout, accounting for all possible magnetic interference from other devices.

Truck dynamics, control system, thermal, and fatigue analyses all need to be completed when designing a new truck design. Using Altair HyperWorks, Hitachi achieves a 10% weight reduction in the main frame and rigid body, while maintaining product quality.

At the end of 2015, the XPRIZE foundation launched the Shell Ocean Discovery competition, a three-year global challenge to advance deep-sea exploration using autonomous subsea drones. Teams competed to develop underwater robots that could fully map 500 km2 of seafloor at a 4 km depth in less than 24 hours with no human intervention. One of the competing teams was TEAMTAO, a collaboration of Newcastle University, SMD (Soil Machine Dynamics Ltd), and UK Research and Innovation. Altair joined the project as a technical design partner and provided the team with simulation expertise to virtually simulate, optimize, and test the devices. Altair simulation specialists followed a simulation-driven design approach in order to save on development time and physical prototyping.

For a recent project, Altran, a leading global engineering consultant company, designed a fluidic circuit for a hemodialysis system. One of the main requirements for hemodialysis is to keep the temperature of the dialysis solution stable while it is flowing through the device. To achieve this, they investigated different layouts and optimal parameters for the fluidic system to minimize heat loss. Since the Finite Element model comprised of more than 7 million elements, they decided to explore different, more rapid simulation strategies for the design exploration stage. Reduced Order Models (ROM) were created using Altair Activate® and Compose® and were validated through comparison with existing CFD models. The use of ROMs, with 30x shorter simulation time, was not just ideal for quick optimization of the system, but also allowed Altran Engineers to challenge, and significantly alter the existing design of the circuit by increasing the number of considered layouts by 1000% (from 5 to 55).

An Altair customer for many years, Schneider Electric at first used only Altair Flux; now the company has extended their usage to several more software products in the Altair HyperWorks suite, including solutions such as Activate, MotionSolve, OptiStruct, and others to apply co-simulation in their development processes. Schneider feels their collaboration with Altair is more like a partnership than the standard supplier-OEM relationship.

French startup Gulplug, located in Grenoble, France, has set out to revolutionize plug and charging technology used in today's electric and hybrid vehicles. To create new products and to drive innovation in the market, Gulplug is using Altair Flux™ and the Altair startup program. Flux helped Gulplug to model and create an innovative, clean, automatically self-plugging, magnetic based charging solution for electric vehicles.

Mabe is a Mexico-based international appliance company designing, producing and distributing a wide spectrum of home appliances such as washing machines, dryers, cooking ranges, refrigerators, air-conditioners, microwaves, etc. Altair technology has enabled Mabe to increase the capacity of their washing machines by 35%, and the spin speed by 24% while reducing the cost per cubic foot by 10%.

Ankers performed co-simulation using a combined multibody and brake systems model in MotionView and Activate to generate more accurate results to analyze thermal and other effects on braking.

The shift toward e-mobility is increasing pressure on the automotive industry as the world awaits more sustainable and affordable solutions. New players are entering the market with fresh ideas and groundbreaking technologies. EVR Motors Ltd. is one of these. The company designs and develops cost-effective radial flux Permanent Magnet (PM) electric machines for a range of power conversion applications. EVR, established in 2012, began developing patents for wind turbine generators. They then adjusted their roadmap to include e-mobility, and developed an innovative e-motor called TS – RFPM based on new, patented technology that provides superior power and torque density – all at lower production costs. When looking for a powerful and accurate electromagnetic and mechanical simulation tool, they chose the Altair simulation tools to simulate their motors before prototyping. Through simulation, EVR developed and tested its new patented motor, which is half the size than some of the industry’s best e-motors.

Bental Motion Systems, a member of the Gevasol Group, produces a variety of end applications including motors, alternators, and electrical brakes for the aerospace & defense, and semiconductor industries. To accelerate the design of electric machines while reacting fast to customer specific requirements, Bental uses Altair FluxMotor to enable quick concept exploration including valuable predictions on machine performance, parameters, and productivity feasibility checks.

In 2019, engineers at Schneider Electric’s R&D center in Mexico took on a project to study the dynamic performance of a microgenerator designed to power a wireless communication card for lighting switches by self-harvesting energy. However, to achieve a successful design, particular consideration needed to be given to operating temperature specifications. Differing operating conditions had to be explored to determine the energy performance of the generator. A fully integrated, multi-physics toolkit was achieved by complementing Altair Flux with Altair Activate™, Altair Compose™, and Altair HyperStudy™. The flexibility and capability of these tools had a dramatic effect not only on the performance outcome, but also the speed with which results were obtained. Moreover, robust risk management was assured, with effective simulation and optimization preventing engineers from heading in the wrong direction, or building prototypes that did not meet the desired objectives.